Google originally did not want to make any money from Android's app store
Google originally did not want to make any money from Android's app store
Back in 2008, Google had not intended to operate the Android Market as a profit center, hoping to collect only a small charge for billing.
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Remember Open Handset Alliance (https://www.openhandsetalliance.com/)?
Or when it was actually possible to make an app for Android using open source tools?
Or when it was actually possible to make an app for Android using open source tools?
Is it not now? There are lots of actively-maintained apps in F-Droid, and as I understand it anything in F-Droid must at least be buildable with open source tools.
Android SDK source code is available, in theory and in theory you can build yourself. In practice binaries provided by Google come with restricting licence how you can use them while source is so scattered around weird control systems that noone knows if it's actually complete source and possible to use.
There was a project to provide FOSS builds of the SDK, but is unmaintained. https://gitlab.com/android-rebuilds/auto Debian also has android-sdk in it's repos, but 23 is the max API level now.
I don't know how F-Droid build apps today, it seems like a big problem.
I'm not sure, but F-Droid does state:
We cannot build apps requiring Non-Free build tools, including Oracle’s JDK or some pre-release toolchains.
They've been pretty consistent about their requirement that everything be open source.